Month: September 2015

In previous blog posts I mention that Bidi and Silk are essentially equivalent. I don’t believe this anymore. I now prefer Silk and I can show you why with a little example. First, let’s define some routes:

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In previous blog posts I mention that Bidi and Silk are essentially equivalent. I don’t believe this anymore. I now prefer Silk and I can show you why with a little example. First, let’s define some routes:

Oops, what happened here? A bit of digging around lead me to the issue Why are query parameters not supported anymore? Essentially, Bidi’s design is that you shouldn’t route on query arguments (which I would agree in principle) and thus it relays on others to separate the two, something I don’t like at all. In a ClojureScript application it would requiring some pre-parsing of the URL, while Silk does it for you.

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In part 1 I covered the basic problem that SPA (single page applications) face and how pre-rendering can help. I showed how to integrate Nashorn into a Clojure app. In this second part, we’ll get to actually do the rendering as well as improving performance. Without further ado, part 2 of isomorphic ClojureScript.

Rendering the application

Now to the fun stuff! It would be nice if we had a full browser running on the server where we could throw our HTML and JS and tell it go! but unfortunately I’m not aware of such thing. What we’ll do instead is call a JavaScript function that will do the rendering and we’ll inject that into our response HTML.

The function to convert a path into HTML will be called render-page and it’ll be in core.cljs:

We need to mark this function as exportable because JavaScript optimizations can be very aggressive even removing dead code and since this code is called dynamically from Clojure, it’ll look like it’s unused and it’ll be removed.

render-page is similar to mount-root but instead of causing the result to be displayed to the user, it just returns it. The former takes the path as an argument while the latter reads it from the local state which is in turn set by Pushy by reading the current URL.

To invoke that function, we’ll go back to handler.clj, just after we define js-engine we’ll define a function called render-page:

and instead of sending a message about the application is loading, we just call it:

[:div#app [:div (render-page path)]]

That extra div is not necessary, it’s there only because projectx.core/current-page adds it and without it you’ll get a funny error in the browser:

Aside from that little trip into the internals of React, which is interesting, we now have a snappy, pre-rendered application… that is… if you can wait 3 seconds or so for it to load:

That is not good, not good at all. We have a serious performance problem here, we need to get serious about fixing it.

Performance

The first step to fix any performance problems is making sure you have one, as premature optimization is the root of all evil. I think we are at this point with this little project. The second step is measuring the problem: we need a good repeatable way of measuring the problem that allows us to actually locate it and and verify it was fixed.

To measure the performance behaviour of this app I’m going to use one of Heroku’s bigger instances, the Performance-L, which is a dedicated machine with 14GB of RAM. The reason is that I don’t want out of memory or my virtual CPU affected by other instances to muddy my measurements. That unacceptable 3 seconds load time was measured in that type of server.

To perform the load and the measurement of the response I’m going to use the free version of BlazeMeter, an web application to trigger load testing which I’m falling in love with. The UI is great. I’m going to hit the home and the about page with their default configuration which includes up to 20 virtual users:

In all the tests I’m going to make a few requests to the application manually after any restart to make sure the application is not being tested in cold. Ok… go!

That is terrible! Under load it behaves so much worst! 17.1s response time. Now that we have a way to measure how horrendous our application is behaving, we need to pin-point which bit is causing this. The elephant in the room is of course server-side JavaScript execution.

Optimizing time

Now it’s time to find optimizations. Poking around Nashorn it seems the issue is that it has a very slow start. We already know that browsers spend a lot of time parsing and compiling JavaScript and the way we are using Nashorn, we are parsing and compiling all our JavaScript in every request. Clearly we should re-use this compiled JavaScript.

Re-using Nashorn is not straightforward because it’s not thread safe while our server is multi-threaded. JavaScript just assumes that there’s one and only thread and when developing Nashorn they decided to respect that and not make any other assumptions, which leads to a non-thread-safe implementation. We need to re-use Nashorn engines, but never at the same time by two or more threads.

Nashorn does provides a way to have binding sets, that is, the state of a program, separate from the Nashorn script engine, so that you could use the same engine with various different states. Unfortunately this is very poorly documented. Fortunately, ClojureScript is immutable, so we don’t have much to worry about breaking state.

After a lot of experimentation and poking, I came up with an acceptable solution using a pool. My choice was to use Dirigiste through Aleph‘s Flow. To do that, we extract the creation of a JavaScript engine into its own function:

flow is aleph.flow and Pools is io.aleph.dirigiste.Pools. In this pool you can have different controllers which create new objects in different ways. The utilization controller will attempt to have the pool at 0.9, the first arg, so that if we are using 9 objects, there should be 10 in the pool. The other two args is the maximum per key and the total maximum and they are set two numbers that are essentially infinite.

The reason for such a big pool is that you should never run out of JavaScript engines. If your server is getting too many requests for the amount of RAM, CPU or whatever limit you find, it should be throttled by some other means, not by an arbitrary pool inside it. Normally you’ll throttle it by limiting the amount of worker threads you have or something like that.

The function render-page was promoted to be top level and now takes care of taking a JavaScript engine from the pool and returning it when done:

Future

There are a few problems or potential problems with this solution that I haven’t addressed yet. One of those is that at the moment I’m not doing anything to have Nashorn generate the same cookies or session as we would have in the real browser.

This pool works well when it’s under constant use, but for many web apps that do not see than level of usage, the pool will kill all script engines which means every request will have to create a fresh one. Solving this might require creating a brand new controller, a mix between Dirigiste’s Pools.utilizationController and Pools.fixedController.

Another approach worth considering is to implement the rendering system in portable Clojure (cljc), the common language between Clojure and ClojureScript and have it run natively on the server, without the need of a JavaScript engine. I’m very skeptical of this working in the long run as it means none of your rendering function can ever use any JavaScript or if they do, you need to implement Clojure(non-Script) equivalents.

Another optimization I briefly explored is not doing the server side rendering for browsers that don’t need it, that is, actual browser being used by people, like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, even IE (>10). The problem is that many bots do identify themselves as those types of browsers and Google gets very unhappy when its bots see a different page than the browsers, so it’s dangerous to perform this optimization except, maybe, for pages that you can only see after you log in.

In conclusion I’m happy enough with this solution to start moving forward and using it, although I’m sure it’ll require much tweaking an improvement. Something I’m considering is turning it into a library, but this library would make quite a bit of assumptions about your application, how things are rendered, compiled, etc. What’s your opinion, would you like to see this code expressed as a library or are you happy to just copy and paste?

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I don’t think I have found the ultimate solution for this problem yet but I have reached a level in which I’m comfortable sharing what I have because I believe it’ll be useful for other people tackling the same problem.

The reason why I doubt this is the ultimate solution is because it has not been battle tested enough for my taste. I haven’t used it in big applications and I haven’t used in production, maintaining it for months or years.

The problem

We are building SPAs, that is, single page applications. Think Google Maps or GMail. When you request the page, you get a relatively small HTML and a huge JavaScript app. This browser app then renders the page and from now on reacts to your interactions, requesting more data from the server whenever needed but never reloading the whole web page.

The reason to develop an application like this is that the user experience ends up being much better. The app feels faster, snappier, more alive. Reloading the whole page, parsing CSS, JavaScript and HTML is slow, but rendering a snippet of HTML is fast. Furthermore, once you have a full app on the client you can start taking advantage of it, performing, for example, validation, storing data than you won’t request again, etc. which saves talking to the server, making the user experience much better.

The problem, though, is that in the initial request you are not sending any content and many web consumers won’t run JavaScript to render your application. I’m talking about search engine bots, snippet generation bots (like the one Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter use). Even though it seems Google’s bot is executing some JavaScript, it might not be wise to depend on it.

Snippet and image generated by Facebook

The solution is to run the client side of the application on the server up to the point of waiting for user interaction, generating the HTML that matches that page, and shipping that to the browser. This also help with the fresh page experience as the user will quickly get some content instead of having to wait for a lot of JavaScript to be parsed, compiled and executed (take a look at GMail and how long it takes to load and show you content).

GMail loading…

JavaScript, on the server

Running the client JavaScript on the server is often referred to as isomorphic JavaScript, meaning, same form, that is, same code, running on both server and client. There are several server-side (no windows, headless) JavaScript implementations to chose from:

When choosing my approach I was looking for a simple solution, one with the least moving parts to make it easier to deploy and more stable over time. Nashorn was an immediate winner as it ships with Java 8 and it’s well integrated, hiding away secondary processes and inter-process communication (if it’s happening at all, I’m not sure, and this is good).

Nashorn came with two big issues though:

It’s slow to create new Nashorn instances (this might be true for all JS implementations).

The documentation is not great.

I think I have overcame both of this issues, so, without further ado, let’s jump in. You can create a new script engine like this:

(.getEngineByName (ScriptEngineManager.) "nashorn")

ScriptEngineManager has many methods to get a script engine, some use the mime type, or the extension, and with those, you may or may not get Nashorn. I prefer to explicitly request Nashorn as it should be available on all Java 8 installations and I don’t believe we can transparently switch JavaScript implementations as they might be too different.

ClojureScript has not been compiled!

In production, you’ll normally want to show a message about the application being loaded. Here we are going to try to replace it with the actual rendered application.

After seeing that page briefly, ClojureScript gets compiled to JavaScript, served to the browser, executed and it renders the homepage, which looks like this:

This template conveniently ships with two pre-built pages, the home page and the about page. Click in the link to go to the about page and you’ll see its content but no request was sent to the server. All content was shipped before and the rendering happens client side:

If we request that URL, we’ll se the same loading message and then the about page is going to be shown, but there’s a problem. The server doesn’t know that the about page was being requested because the fragment, the bit after the # in the URL, is not sent to the server.

The reason why it’s taking the path and not the full URL is that the ClojureScript part of this app works with paths instead of URLs and we’ll need them to be consistent. This is due to how Pushy and likely HTML5 History behave.

The JavaScript engine

Now things get interesting. The render-app method needs to run some JavaScript, so it’ll create the script engine. First, we need to import it (and also require clojure.java.io , which we’ll be using soon):

It doesn’t yet render anything, but let’s give it a try, let’s see it load the code or… well… fail:

javax.script.ScriptException: ReferenceError: "document" is not defined in <eval> at line number 2

What’s happening here is that app.js is referring document and Nashorn implements JavaScript, but it’s not a browser, it doesn’t have the global, window or document global objects. Let’s look at the offending file:

This is a generated JavaScript file that is loaded by our small HTML file. It in turns causes the rest of the JavaScript files to be loaded but the mechanism it uses works in a browser, not in Nashorn. This is where things get hard.

It’s built with no optimizations. One of the optimizations, called whitespace, puts all the JavaScript in a single file, so there’s no document trick to load them, but sadly, it will not work in Figwheel.

The solution I came up with, a hack, is to have two builds. One called app which is what I consider the JavaScript app itself and the other one called server-side, which is the one prepared to run on the server:

For sanity’s sake, I changed the output of app to go to the directory called app, instead of out. Running Figwheel will auto-compile app, but not server-side; for that, you also need to run lein cljsbuild auto. Now the application loads with no errors.

We also need to properly configure server-side for the dev and uberjar profiles:

You might have notice that we are not including env/dev/cljs and env/dev/cljs for server-side. That is because those files call projectx.core/init!, which triggers the whole application to start working, which depends on global objects, like window, which are not present in Nashorn.

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This post describes how I got New Relic to run with my Clojure project. I’m using Heroku but most of what I say here should be applicable in other environments and I’ll try to point you in the right direction when it doesn’t. Please, feel free to comment with improvements or corrections.

There are already a few articles out there about this same subject but none of them gave me a complete picture, which is what I’m attempting here. I’ll cite my references at the end.

Enabling New Relic

There are two ways to enable New Relic in a Heroku app. One is through a command like this one:

heroku addons:create newrelic:wayne

The other way is through the dashboard of the app in question. It doesn’t matter which way you use, but after enabling it, your dashboard should have an entry for New Relic, like this:

Click on “New Relic APM :: Newrelic”, which will take you to your New Relic welcome screen (unless you already have projects). If you are not using Heroku, creating a New Relic account will land you at a similar-looking page:

Click on APM – that’s Application Performance Management, i.e. what most people have in mind when they say “New Relic”. That will take you to the page in which you choose which programming language or framework you are using:

Sadly, no Clojure, so just click on Java.

If you already have a New Relic project, to create a new one, search for the “Add More” link:

Once you click on Java, you’ll see the instructions to install the Java agent in a Java project:

In the rest of this post I’ll explain how to get the Java agent running in a Clojure project. But first, the configuration.

Configuration

New Relic has a licence key that your app will use to both identify and authenticate itself. If you scroll down you’ll see a button to reveal that key:

On that page click “Download the Java agent”. It’s a zip file containing some documentation, a bunch of jar files, and the one file you care about: newrelic.yml. Copy that file to the root of your Clojure project.

In that file, you’ll find the licence key specified in a line like this:

license_key: 'bab654434b8672dc0580ab7f88bf9c7984dd81bd'

Having credentials in your source code repository is a bad idea. Your app should be able to be open source without your server and services being compromised. Even if your app is not open source, you may get developers and designers that you don’t trust working on it or you might use third party services to run tests, perform static analysis, etc, etc. that you don’t want to have the keys of your kingdom.

Remove the licence so that that line looks like this:

license_key: ''

and instead make sure you export an environment variable named NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY that will be automatically picked up by New Relic to authenticate to their server:

NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY="bab654434b8672dc0580ab7f88bf9c7984dd81bd"

Heroku sets this up automatically when you add the plug-in, and you can see this environment variable in your applications settings:

Another alternative would be to provision the servers with a full copy of newrelic.yml, an approach I use when deploying Rails applications with Capistrano but I’ve never used it with a Clojure or Java application.

In the config file, also search for the lines defining the name of your application:

and replace all mentions of “My Application” with the proper name of your application. Leave the extra bits between parenthesis as it is, so you can identify whether a report or alert is referring to production, staging or something else.

Java Agent

New Relic for Java runs as a Java agent. You can learn more about them in the java.lang.instrument documentation but in short, they are jars that are loaded by the JVM independently and around your own application. Leiningen has support for Java Agents by adding:

New Relic is being loaded and it’s complaining about the lack of a key. That’s a good thing.

When you deploy to production, things won’t go as smooth. Java won’t be able to find the newrelic-agent.jar in the CLASSPATH so it’ll just silently skip the agent. There’s a command line for java that will help it locate the jar: -javaagent:newrelic-agent.jar. The problem with that is, where’s the jar? Nowhere to be seen.

The official recommendation from New Relic and other blog posts is to copy the jar file to your source tree and then reference it from there. That has two problems:

Having big blobs in source control is not very nice.

That jar is out of the loop of dependencies, so it won’t ever be upgraded unless someone remembers to explicitly do it. That’s bad.

To solve this problem I created a library called jar-copier that copies a Java agent jar into a configured directory so that you can point to it with the command line. This works in Heroku because when you deploy, the source code is checked out from git and then the uberjar is built on that same server, so jar-copier has an opportunity to run and place the jar in the correct place.

If you are shipping ready-made uberjars, you’ll have to find another way to provision your server with a copy of the agent jar in a well known location that you can point to (or that’s in the CLASSPATH ).

jar-copier is a Leiningen plug-in, so you need to add it to your list of plug-ins like this:

:plugins [; other plugins
[com.carouselapps/jar-copier "0.2.0"]]

then, to make sure it’s run automatically, your project needs:

:prep-tasks ["javac" "compile" "jar-copier"]

and finally, you need to configure jar-copier to copy Java agents and know the destination, for example:

Reporting data

By this point, the Java agent is running and possibly reporting some data, but you are not instrumenting your code. I found a bunch of libraries that you can use to instrument your code and by far my favorite is new-reliquary because it provides Ring middleware.

At the time of this writing, the released version, 0.1.5, doesn’t support reporting data as a web transaction. New Relic will categorize the data as Non-Web, which is not what you want. Thankfully there’s already a pull request to fix this and we released it as com.carouselapps/new-reliquary 0.1.5. We are likely to request it to be deleted once it’s released properly, but until then, feel free to use our copy.

After adding it to your project, you need to add the Ring middleware. In the file where you set up your middleware add the following requires:

which doesn’t enable New Relic in development. Yours is probably quite different though. And that’s it, you should now be seeing your performance reports in New Relic. You can see a full example in proclodo-spa-server-rendering’s

Shameless plug time! At Carousel Apps we not only use New Relic, we have a constant dashboard displaying it so we never lose sight of our current performance and servers. We’ve created a product to display dashboards like this called Screensaver Ninja. It displays websites, including New Relic, as your screensaver, so you can turn all your computers into information disseminators. It’s also great for permanent screens, as it displays many web sites in rotation, keeping them fresh (useful even for self updating websites, like New Relic, because sometimes they crash) as well as keeping the computer secure by using the screensaver lock.

My References

In the process of getting New Relic to work with Clojure running on Heroku, I found the following blog posts:

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jar-copier is a Leiningen plug in to copy jars from your dependencies to your source tree. It’s a very small simple utility that proved to be necessary to have a sane setup with Java agents (New Relic for example).

It’s very simple to use. Put [jar-copier “0.1.0”] into the :plugins vector on your project.clj. To run this plug in, execute:

$ lein jar-copier

If you want the task to run automatically, which is recommended, add:

:prep-tasks ["javac" "compile" "jar-copier"]

and it’ll be invoked every time you build your uberjar.

You need to configure the plug-in in your project.clj like this:

:jar-copier {:java-agents true
:destination "resources/jars"}

:java-agents instruct this plug in to automatically copy any jars that are specified as Java agents. :destination specifies where to copy them to.

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While trying to understand the behaviour of my implementation of server side JavaScript execution for pre-rendering SPAs (Single Page Applications), something I’ll write about later on, I quickly run out of memory on Heroku. What I believe was going on is that my Heroku machine was trying to handle too many requests at the same time.

The change to allow specifying how many threads Jetty will use was not hard, but I was surprised I didn’t find it documented explicitly anywhere, so, here it is. My app, created from the re-agent template, had the following -main function: